January

Wilkes University English Department Hosts Authors for the Allan Hamilton Dickson
Spring Writers Series

January 15, 2019|Submitted by: Vicki Mayk

The Wilkes University English Department’s Allan Hamilton Dickson Fund Writers Series
brings three distinguished writers to campus in the spring 2019 semester. Each of
the writers will visit campus to read from their work and conduct workshops with students.
The readings are free and open to the public.

The series kicks off on Thursday, Feb. 28 with Dave Eggers, best-selling author and
founder of McSweeney’s. The reading will be at 7:30 p.m. in the Dorothy Dickson Darte
Center for the Performing Arts, 239 S River St, Wilkes-Barre. The event is free and
open to the public. Earlier in the day, Eggers will lead a student workshop.

Eggers is the author of ten books, including Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?, A Hologram for the King, which was a finalist for the 2012 National Book Award, and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. He is the founder of McSweeney’s, an
independent publishing company based in San Francisco that produces books, a quarterly
journal of new writing and a monthly magazine. McSweeney’s also publishes Voice of Witness, a nonprofit book series that uses oral history to illuminate human rights crises
around the world.

The other authors in the spring 2019 series are:

Carmen Maria Machado, author of the short story collection Her Body and Other Parties, will read on Monday, March 18 in the Salon of Kirby Hall at 7:30 p.m. Nominated for the National Book Award, The New York Times called Machado’s collection “a love letter to an obstinate genre that won’t be gentrified.
It’s a wild thing, this book, covered in sequins and scales, blazing with the influence
of fabulists from Angela Carter to Kelly Link and Helen Oyeyemi, and borrowing from
science fiction, queer theory and horror.” The book won the Bard Fiction Prize, the
Shirley Jackson Prize, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, the National
Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize and the Richard Yates Short Story Prize,
among others. Her memoir, In The Dream House, will be released in fall 2019 by Greywolf Press. Machado earned the Master of Fine
Arts degree from the Iowa Writers Workshop. She is writer in residence at the University
of Pennsylvania.

Acclaimed novelist, essayist and short story writer NoViolet Bulawayo will read on
Wednesday, April 17 at 7:30 p.m. in the Salon of Kirby Hall. She is the author of the novel We Need New Names, which was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize. It was recognized with the LA Times Book Prize Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, the Pen/Hemingway Award, and the
Etisalat Prize for Literature. It also was selected to The New York Times Notable Books of 2013 list, the Barnes and Noble Discover Great New Writers list
and others. In writing about her novel in The New York Times, Uzodinma Iweala praised Bulawayo’s “striking ability to capture the uneasiness that
accompanies a newcomer’s arrival in America, to illuminate how the reinvention of
the self in a new place confronts the protective memory of the way things were back
home.” NoViolet’s story “Hitting Budapest” won the 2011 Caine Prize for African Writing.
A native of Zimbabwe, Bulawayo earned the Master of Fine Arts degree from Cornell
University and is now the Jones Lecturer in fiction at Stanford University.